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Afghanistan: Obama Trusts Himself When All Men Doubt Him

No one who ever heard Barack Obama's campaign rhetoric about the war in Afghanistan should really be surprised at the President's decision to send 30,000 additional troops there in one last push to establish stability in a country that has long conspicuously lacked it. Whether Obama's plan can work is an altogether different question, but it seems impossible to doubt the conviction behind his effort.

In his address to the nation—and the somber-faced young cadets of West Point—Tuesday night, Obama repeatedly invoked the national unity and global consensus that followed the 9/11 attacks, and reminded his listeners that the fight in Afghanistan had been seen as a wise war of necessity, until the Bush administration was distracted from it by its adventure in Iraq. Re-establishing that unity will be all but impossible, but Obama was wise to remind his countrymen that we got into this mess together, and that together we have to find a way out.

Liberals hate his policy (even if some praised his speech), while conservatives tepidly embrace the plan as the work of generals who are better men than Obama (while deriding his deliberation as "dithering" and his speech as defeatist, with its call for an exit strategy in 18 months). When no one likes what the president does, it's not easy, but that doesn't mean he's wrong, either. Many of the bravest, wisest moves in American political history have been terrifically unpopular at the time presidents made them.I can't, for the life of me, decide how I feel about the substance of Obama's approach. Afghanistan has been the sinkhole of great powers who would tame it for generations, and may well be again. When I was there for a few hours in early 2002 with Colin Powell, he held a news conference with Hamid Karzai. Just as it began, the power failed, and that seemed to me then, and ever since, a handy metaphor for the challenges at hand. The cops of Kabul and Kandahar would so far seem to have a lot in common with those of Keystone, and corruption, incompetence and cowardice are rife.

But if I'm uncertain about the wisdom of the president's course, I felt better—as I usually do—after hearing him describe it, in the calm, measured, rational way that is his trademark. I take it as a great comfort that Obama took his time and reviewed all his options, none of which were good and all of which carried great risks. At this point, there seems virtually nothing this president could offer that would please the Cheney wing of the Republican Party—except perhaps his resignation and a guilty plea to charge of treason. The loudest voices on Obama's left flank are equally clangorous and implacable.

In a sense, Obama now finds himself in precisely the situation in which he has often operated most effectively: facing doubts from all quarters. In Kipling's words, he trusts himself when all men doubt him, but makes allowance for their doubting, too. At the end of the day, those can't be bad qualities in a man, or a president.